Suburban Horror
I began having having heart problems at the beginning of the benighted year of 2020.
I started walking around my suburban neighborhood in early summer, as exercise. I walked between one and two hours, after work, as people were coming home from work and school, as kids played in front yards, as the evening news was being turned on and supper was being cooked in kitchens.
This was toward the beginning of the pandemic, so I had a mask at the ready in my pocket, and kept socially distanced. At first I listened to baseball. But as the summer wore on (and Mets began to clearly suck), I listened to baseball less and less. Sometimes I listened to the news. More and more, I listened to nothing, and opened up my senses to the houses I passed as I walked.
Trump flags, and American flags, hung from many porch flagpoles. No Biden signs. None. As election day approached, and later, as the aftermath approached, it felt like huge forces were at work around me, and a reckoning approached.
I wrote three short stories in this time, all set in suburbia. One begins with almost the exact same sentence that begins this post. They are stories about family, and politics, and neighborhood dynamics, and monsters. They are about menace hiding the guise of normal, everyday objects. Hopefully you’ll be able to read some of them soon.
As the weather turned colder, my exercise routine took me indoors. But those late summer walks color my memories of this extraordinary time in our country, and in my life. The leaning shadows, the ominous flags, the backyard swings and baseball games, the unshakable feeling of some violent fate looming, hidden among these comfortable suburban totems of normalcy.
Peace.